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That new kind of IT presents big challenges, especially as businesses and governments are being forced to accelerate their IT transformations, HP's Whitman said.

"Companies can no longer take nine months to develop version 1 of an app," she said. "Then take nine months to develop version 2. These things now have to take place in a matter of weeks."

IT is also no longer just a matter of keeping the computers running, Whitman said, using a nautical analogy to describe how the business is changing.

"Everyone in this room is no longer down in the engine room [of the ship]," she said. "You are all up in the bridge consulting with the captain. And, HP is here to help you earn your stripes."

Whitman said that data center infrastructures threaten to get out of control, with an estimated 8 million to 10 million new servers, taking up the equivalent of 200 football fields' worth of space required to meet new workloads in the next three years.

That growth stems from several megatrends, including the move to cloud computing and a need for across-the-board security, she said. For instance, by 2016, about 75 percent of IT environments will be in private, managed or public clouds.

HP's strategy is to provide solutions to meet the requirements for a new style of IT, Whitman said. This includes the development of its Project Moonshot servers, which she said can cut power requirements by up to 89 percent, footprint by up to 80 percent, and cost by up to 77 percent when compared to legacy server architectures.

For instance, hp.com, which currently gets about 300 million hits per day, is currently being run on Moonshot servers that in total consume less power than 12 60-watt light bulbs.

HP is also continuing to innovate in big data, cloud computing, storage and security, and it is also looking at partnership opportunities such as HP's decision to resell Google Apps, which she said will result in an "SMB IT in a Box" solution featuring PCs, printers, the Google Apps software and perhaps even one of the new HP Gen 8 Microservers.

These initiatives and others are part of HP's way to help provide continued growth for customers and partners, Whitman said.

"We understand that you may go to work feeling like Clark Kent, but when you get there, you're expected to act like Superman," she said. "HP is helping you put on that red cape."

CRN's 2018 MSP 500
With the fast-growing -- and fast-changing -- MSP landscape in mind, CRN has again assembled the MSP 500, an annual list that recognizes North American solution providers with cutting-edge approaches to managed services.